Maybe This Time

  “North sent you?” Why didn’t he come?

  “He didn’t exactly send me,” Southie said. “I just got the feeling you needed me.”

  “So you brought me a TV reporter?”

  “Broadcast journalist,” Kelly said crisply, and followed it up with another blinding smile. “It’s raining. Could we come in?”

  Andie looked at the younger guy with the silver bag. “And you are?”

  “Cameraman,” he said, bored by the conversation already. “Bill. I drove the truck.”

  Andie craned her neck to see a red Miata that had to be Kelly O’Keefe’s parked just this side of the bridge beside a huge satellite truck that said NEWS4 on the side. She spared a moment to wonder how the hell they’d gotten that truck down the drive and how the hell they were going to get it back up again now that the rain was turning dirt to mud, and then she looked at Southie. “A TV reporter, a cameraman, and a . . .” She smiled at the baggy-eyed man, not sure what he was, but he was glancing around again, his face practically twitching with suspicion over his truly ugly argyle cardigan.

  “Professor,” Southie said. “Professor Dennis Graff.”

  Andie nodded at the professor and then turned back to Southie. “And again, why?”

  “He’s bringing you . . . the chance of a lifetime,” Kelly said, practically singing the words.

  “No, thank you.” Andie stared at Southie, still waiting for an explanation.

  Southie tried another smile. “Let’s go inside and—”

  “You are not filming anything here,” Andie told him. “Especially not my ki . . . these kids. Forget it.”

  Dennis looked from Andie to Southie and back again. “Weren’t we invited? I thought we were expected.”

  “Honestly, Sullivan,” Kelly said, giving him a playful little push. “You mean you didn’t call? You didn’t ask about the séance?”

  “Séance?” Andie said.

  “It’ll be wonderful,” Kelly enthused. “I’ve hired the best medium in Ohio—Isolde Hammersmith, she’s coming later—and Dennis is here to provide the counterpoint! Could we come in? It’s raining.”

  “Counterpoint?” Andie said. “What counterpoint? What the hell, Southie?”

  “We can talk about all that later,” Southie said hastily. “But now we should go inside because you want to hear everything Dennis has to say.” He clapped the professor on the back and made him stumble forward a little bit. “Sorry, Dennis.”

  “Wait a minute—” Andie said.

  “Who are they?” Alice said from behind her.

  Andie sighed. “Hello, Alice. This is your uncle Southie.”

  “Hi, Alice,” Southie said, with that smile that had charmed thousands of females. “What’s new?”

  Alice considered it. “I like nuts now.”

  “So do I,” Southie said, evidently willing to bond over damn near anything.

  “Hey, there, honey.” Kelly crouched down in front of Alice in faux-equality. “I’m Kelly.”

  “You have a lot of teeth,” Alice said.

  “Aren’t you just precious?” Kelly said, her smile fixed in place.

  “No,” Alice said, and looked past her. “Who are they?”

  “This is Bill,” Kelly said, gesturing to the younger guy as she stood up again, still in that too bright voice. “He’s a cameraman!”

  Alice and Bill looked at each other with an equal lack of enthusiasm.

  “I’ll get the pizzas,” Bill said, and went back to the truck, ignoring the rain.

  “Pizza?” Alice said, perking up.

  “And this is Dennis. He knows about ghosts!”

  Alice froze.

  “Hello,” Dennis said to Alice, politely but with no enthusiasm.

  Alice moved closer to Andie. “Why is he here?”

  “I don’t know,” Andie said, looking at Southie, now really alert. “Why is he here?”

  “Because he’s an expert,” Southie said, leaning on the last word so hard it almost broke. “Tell her, Dennis.”

  “I’m a parapsychologist.” Dennis frowned as Bill came back up the walk with four pizzas. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Archer, I thought we were expected here.”

  “Wait, you actually, academically, know about ghosts?” Andie said to him, and then the name finally registered. “You’re Dennis Graff? From Cleveland? Professor Dennis Graff?” The buzzkill from the panel who doesn’t believe in ghosts?

  He nodded, taken aback.

  Thunder rolled again and Andie opened the door wide.

  “Come on in, Dennis,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  Seven

  They’d filed into the entrance hall and then into the Great Hall—“This is amazing,” Kelly had said, beaming at Andie as she shook the rain off her coat; “Terrible light,” Bill groused, shaking his head at the mullioned windows in front; “Early seventeenth century,” the professor said, gazing at the gallery—and Andie led them into the dining room, directed them to chairs, called on a hostile Mrs. Crumb to leave her gin rummy game and bring paper plates and sodas. She put the professor at one end of the long dining room table and Kelly at the other end, while Kelly tried to give Andie forty reasons why it was her duty to invite the undead to dinner or at least to a séance the next day.

  “Not now,” Andie said to her, and when Southie called the little blonde back down to the other end of the table, Andie sat the professor down on her right and Alice on her left, put pizza in front of both of them, made sure Alice’s was cut into smaller pieces, that her jewelry and the front of her already grubby black T-shirt were covered with a paper napkin, and that her stocking-tied hair wasn’t flopping in her face or her dinner, checked to make sure that Carter had pizza and wasn’t sitting next to Kelly-the-child-interviewer, and sat down beside her ticket to enlightenment.

  “So, Dr. Graff,” she said. “You’re a parapsychologist.”

  “Uh, yes. Yes. I am.” He raised the pizza to his mouth and then stopped and said, “You can call me Dennis. It’s, well, you know. No classroom.” He laughed for a second—a reserved little heh-heh sound that was almost spooky in its weirdness—and then frowned and bit into his pizza, dripping tomato sauce onto his green argyle cardigan.

  “Right,” Andie said, thinking, Well, the normal ones probably don’t go into parapsychology. She resisted the urge to wipe the sauce off him as if he were Alice and bit into her pizza, savoring the spices and the crunch of the crust, but keeping her eyes on the prize. “I’ve read about you. You’re a ghost expert.”

  Dennis shook his head, trying to chew the gluey cheese and wipe the tomato sauce from his mouth at the same time. “No,” he said, when he’d swallowed. “I study ESP, telepathy, remote viewing, that kind of thing, which is how I got into poltergeists. Well, not into . . .” He shook his head, did that little insane laugh thing, and bit into his pizza again.

  “So you don’t do ghosts,” Andie said. Damn.

  “I’m well versed in general psychic phenomena.” Dennis reached for his Coke and noticed the sauce on his sweater. He dabbed at it with a napkin, making the spot bigger and the sweater uglier. “I have not, however, personally seen any kind of supernatural apparition, nor have I seen any irrefutable documentation.”

  “That must be disappointing. I—”

  “Not really. It stands to reason. Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler showed that skepticism suppresses psychic abilities.” Dennis gave up on the tomato sauce spot and went back to his pizza. “The very fact that I’m a scientist makes it impossible for me to see that which I most wish to study.”

  “So you don’t think they exist,” Andie said. “The thing is—”

  “I would doubt they exist except for one thing: Every culture has ghosts.” Dennis took another bite of pizza.

  Andie frowned. “I don’t see—”

  “Every culture in every millennium has had people from all social classes, all age groups, all degrees of education and intelligence see ghosts. Unless you’re a believer in an ongoing wo
rldwide, millennium-spanning mass hallucination”—he did his weird little heh-heh laugh, which ended this time in an asthmatic cough—“ghosts exist.”

  “Yeah,” Andie said. “I know.”

  Dennis bit into his slice again, but this time instead of concentrating on the pizza, he was concentrating on her. He swallowed and said, “You strike me as a skeptical kind of person. Not somebody who believes in the paranormal.”

  “And a week ago, you’d have been right,” Andie said.

  “But now you think you have a ghost,” Dennis said.

  At the other end of the long table, Kelly jerked her head toward them, away from her conference with Southie. “What?”

  “All we have for breakfast is toast,” Andie said, and caught Alice watching her, looking interested.

  “We have cereal,” Alice said. “And French toast, which I will not eat.”

  “And cereal,” Andie called down to Kelly, and then she looked at Alice. “Are you finished with your pizza?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Then keep eating.” Andie turned back to Dennis. “So you don’t think ghosts exist.”

  “Oh, they exist,” Dennis said. “We just don’t know what all of them are.”

  “All of them?”

  “There four kinds. Like the Beatles.” He heh-hehed again, but Andie was getting used to it now.

  “Of course there are,” Andie said, thinking, I had to get an academic who thinks he’s a comedian.

  “The most common is the crisis apparition. It appears once within twelve hours of a death or coma or whatever the crisis is.”

  “Appears. Like . . .”

  “Like a ghost.” Dennis smiled a tight little professorial smile. “Usually it’s someone who’s just died and needs to say good-bye, more telepathy than apparition. Crisis can activate that kind of skill.”

  “Telepathy. For real,” Andie said.

  “As real as we can test for, but yes, for real. Crisis apparitions are well documented with anecdotal evidence and fit with what we know of telepathy. They’re often just voices, not really an apparition at all.”

  Andie was pretty sure they hadn’t lost anybody in the last twelve hours, so she said, “We don’t have those here.”

  “Then there’s the haunting,” Dennis went on. “The apparitions show up in the same place, at the same time, doing the same thing. More like a voice-over.” Heh heh.

  Andie thought of May, dancing at the foot of her bed every night. “That kind. Are they dangerous?”

  “They’re not even a ‘they.’ The theory is that it’s just leftover energy from some cataclysmic event like a murder. The way you can smell perfume in a room after somebody has left, you can see the energy in the room after the catastrophe has passed.” Dennis kept plowing through the pizza as he spoke, his mind clearly divided between Food and Lecture, which Andie had a feeling was probably the majority of his life.

  “Catastrophe,” she said. Archer House was definitely the kind of place that had catastrophes. Still . . . “I don’t think it’s that kind. At least one of them is more than perfume. We have conversations.”

  “Then there are apparitions of the living,” Dennis said as if she hadn’t spoken. “Also called astral projection. The doppelgänger.”

  “No,” Andie said. “This one is dead. Let’s go back to that second one again. I think that’s the one we have.”

  “Really,” Dennis said. “I would have assumed that you have the fourth one, a poltergeist. A noisy ghost. Throws things, breaks things—”

  “It’s really pretty calm here,” Andie said. Aside from the ghost.

  “—because you have an angry teenager,” Dennis went on, and then picked up his next piece of pizza. “Poltergeists are caused by telekinesis awakened by puberty.”

  “Carter?” Andie said, looking down the table at him.

  Carter caught her staring and rolled his eyes, probably at how uncool she was, but possibly about what a pain in the ass Kelly was being since she was trying to talk to him across the table.

  Andie turned back to Dennis. “Carter’s not a teenager, he’s twelve. And if he wanted to throw something, he’d just throw it. Carter does not need an intermediary.”

  Dennis shook his head as he chewed. “The children don’t even know they’re doing it. Completely involuntary.”

  “Carter doesn’t do involuntary. We don’t have a poltergeist. So, the haunting. Is that common?”

  “Oh, yes,” Dennis said. “Very common. Borley Rectory in England is probably the most famous, but there are many.” He picked up the last piece of pizza from the box.

  “Okay,” Andie said. “How did they get rid of their ghost?”

  Dennis looked at her over his glasses. “They discovered that the lady of the house was having an affair with a lodger and faked the haunting to fool her husband.”

  “Oh. Well, nobody’s having an affair here.” Andie thought of May. “Although the ghost I talk to is all in favor of it.”

  Dennis stopped chewing. “You talk to it?”

  “Yes,” Andie said, taking the plunge into crazy. “Either that or I’ve dreamed it. I think Alice’s aunt talks with me. I think she sits with Alice at night in the rocking chair at the foot of her bed. Or it might be the woman out at the pond who was looking at Alice. I’m not sure. This is all really new to me.”

  “Alice?” Dennis looked across the table at Alice, now plastered with tomato sauce, strings of cheese on the napkin at her neck.

  Alice looked up when she heard her name and stared back long enough that Dennis looked away.

  Andie nodded, keeping her voice low. “The housekeeper thinks the ghost that sits with her is somebody who died a hundred years ago. I’ve only seen that one once by the pond, and really, she could have been anybody, a real person in fancy dress. Although why anybody would dress up and hang around a pond is beyond me.”

  Dennis put down his pizza. “You’ve seen this.”

  “The one by the pond, yes. And the one in my room.”

  Dennis pushed his plate away. “No offense intended, but had you been drinking or taking sleeping pills or—”

  “No,” Andie said. “Sometimes I have a cup of tea at night with a shot of brandy, but I hadn’t been drinking when I saw the woman at the pond. Look, you just said there are hauntings—”

  “I said that was a classification,” Dennis said, serious now. “I said there were stories. I didn’t say they existed.”

  “But you said poltergeists—”

  “The other three kinds of ghosts aren’t ghosts at all in the popular sense of the word. They’re projections, telepathy or telekinesis, from living people or from people who have just died and are making the transition from one life to the next. They’re ephemeral. The kind of haunting you’re talking about lasts. On anecdotal evidence it can last for centuries, but it’s completely unsubstantiated. The others all have been shown to be real and explainable, but the haunting is folklore or fraud.”

  “Not here it isn’t,” Andie said, annoyed that he’d led her on.

  “You’ve only seen this woman once,” Dennis said.

  “I thought I saw a ghost across the pond, and I think Alice saw her, too, but she wouldn’t say so. In fact, she refused to look that way at all, which is what made me think she saw her, too.” She looked over at Alice who was chomping into her pizza again, ignoring them with great purpose. “I’ve talked with her dead aunt several times. I thought I was dreaming, but now I don’t know. I’m new to all of this, I’m still getting it sorted out.”

  “I thought you said the ghost was at the foot of Alice’s bed.”

  “There’s a rocking chair there that Alice talks to. It rocks on its own. Mrs. Crumb thinks it’s the really old ghost that I saw at the pond, but I think it’s the ghost of Alice’s aunt who died this June. A new ghost.” She has that new-ghost smell . . .

  “Uh huh. Well, Miss, uh . . .”

  “Mrs. Archer,” Andie said, looking around for
Mrs. Crumb. “But you can call me Andie.”

  “Andie,” Dennis said awkwardly. “It could be a projection of, uh, repressed needs. Say if you had issues with an uncaring mother and wanted to see someone watching over Alice—”

  “No,” Andie said. “My mother is not uncaring.” My father was, but my mother is just odd.

  “—or possibly not,” Dennis went on smoothly. “But sometimes our own needs—”

  “Look, I’m not a believe-in-ghosts kind of woman.”

  Dennis looked at her appraisingly, his pale eyes surprisingly shrewd. “No, I don’t think you are.”

  “So we’ll just leave my mother out of it.”

  Dennis nodded, and Andie turned to wipe down Alice, torn between being glad she had a ghost expert and thinking she was insane for being glad she had a ghost expert. At least he was nice, a little pompous but sympathetic, and he was treating her seriously, which was a relief.

  “I’m done now,” Alice said, as Andie wiped pizza sauce off her bat necklace, and she slid off the chair and went upstairs to get ready for bed, Carter close behind her.

  At the end of the long table, Kelly waved to her. “We need to talk about the séance,” she called.

  “The séance?” Andie said, looking at Dennis.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “So you don’t believe in séances.”

  “I’m here to provide skepticism,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s why you’re the counterpoint. And Kelly’s the believer?”

  “No, I believe that’s Mrs. Hammersmith, the medium. She’s due to arrive tomorrow. She apparently had an engagement with the Other Side tonight.”

  “Would a séance do any good?”

  Dennis looked at her with great patience. “Since ghosts only exist in folklore, fiction, and fraud, no.”

  “You are not much help,” Andie said, exasperated. “You and Boston Ulrich—”

  “Don’t put me in the same sentence with that man,” Dennis snapped, the first lively thing he’d done since he’d arrived.

  “Really,” Andie said, impressed. “I read you were on a panel together—”

  “Complete charlatan. Advertises himself as an academic and a . . . ghostbuster.” Dennis said the last word with such loathing that Andie was taken aback. “He’s everything that’s wrong in the academic paranormal world. He wants to be popular.” He looked off into the distance, practically grinding his teeth. “And he just got another book deal.”